Gostar disto:

Behind the humanitarian disaster of the Syrian civil war is a political crisis the Left urgently needs to understand. The Syrian tragedy is a key moral and political question today. Yet it has not been easy for leftists around the world to decide where they stand on Syria.

To illuminate the history and nature of the Syrian conflict, Yusef Khalil for Jacobin conducted an extensive interview with Yasser Munif, a Syrian scholar who studies grassroots movements in the country. The wide-ranging discussion that follows focuses on such core issues as the character of the Assad regime; the roots and development of the Syrian revolution, and the various opposition groups active there; regional and global interests and interventions; and the tasks and responsibilities of US solidarity.

Before accusing me of being a killjoy, let me start on the bright side. Any measure that simplifies the social security system is very welcome. If in order to apply for a social allowance we have to fill in a single form for a single benefit, instead of choosing from tens of benefits with different names that are essentially the same, that’s great. A simplification of the social insurance system is sorely needed, but we don’t need to reinvent the wheel to achieve this objective.

Being unconditional, it will be possible for the beneficiary to accumulate the basic income with other earnings. Sounds great, right? But what will the effect be upon wages? Will it exert a downward pressure upon salaries, especially in a country with no minimum wage such as Finland? Will the basic income simply become part of the workers’ wages, thus putting society to pay part of the value of labour and therefore expanding capitalist profit at the cost of public resources? If so, no wonder a right-wing government is considering this model.

Boost employment?

This is what I find most disturbing in the overall discussion about this subject. The main argument for the unconditional basic income is based on the same premise as the one used to justify cuts in unemployment assistance, forcing the unemployed to take jobs with wages below the unemployment benefits, or humiliating them with mandatory visits to the employment office. This premise is simple: people don’t work because they lack “motivation”. If we had 560€ unconditionally granted to us every month, we’d all be utterly motivated and happily employed, I guess. Sure, it will be easier to accept short-term contracts, but shouldn’t we be trying to eliminate precarious employment instead of paving the way for it?

The Finnish basic income won’t solve a thing

People are unemployed because there are no jobs. A quick search in the Finnish employment office website gives us a total of around 13.000 job openings, while there are more than 450.000 unemployed in the country. On the contrary to what the proponents of the unconditional basic income argue, this alarming unemployment level is not due to technological innovation and the automation of the labour process. Firstly, it derives from a deep economic crisis which led to the closure of companies, collective redundancies, lay-offs, etc. It is not due to the development of the productive forces, but exactly the opposite, their destruction. Secondly, it is the result of the deindustrialization of the Finnish economy, characterized by the widespread practice of social dumping.

If Sipilä, Orpo and Soini really intended to boost employment they’d be shortening the workday duration, promoting public investment and reindustrializing the country. If they wished to combat poverty they’d be distributing the social wealth among those who actually produce it, instead of enabling a few to accumulate it in offshore accounts. In a word, the total of social labour and the wealth thus created must be distributed among all.

Technological innovation and the automation of the labour process is a menace for the working class only within a mode of production based on private property of the means of production. That’s why it’s high time to develop a new mode of production based on new relations of production. That’s why it is high time for the collectivization and democratic management of the means of production, aiming towards an economy guided by the social needs, instead of the expansion of the profits of a parasitic minority.

But we all know that we can’t demand this from a right-wing government led by a millionaire and comprised of conservatives and crypto-fascist populists. These tasks can only be accomplished by a socialist government founded upon mass mobilization by the workers and the popular classes. Unfortunately, no alternative of the kind is on the horizon and a great part of the Finnish left is naively falling for the hoax of the unconditional basic income.